


The fire lit up everywhere at once

by hailhydraheyskye



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, End of the World, F/M, Family Bonding, Second Chances, Sort Of, road trips through hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:21:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25690486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hailhydraheyskye/pseuds/hailhydraheyskye
Summary: Okay. Maybe Pansy Parkinson was not well aware enough of the breaking-up rulebook’s existence before actually doing it.But could she have planned the world was fucking going to end, and burn and dies in the following twenty-four hours? No, she could not have. She could not have because she was busy emptying the cherry Coke cans her ex-boyfriend had left in her mini-fridge, a sad remnant of a time where she cared more about biting the sugar off his chapped lips than about the tons of chemical agents in there supposed to mimic the taste of cherry.Or, Regulus, Sirius and Pansy at the end of the world
Relationships: Regulus Black/Pansy Parkinson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The fire lit up everywhere at once

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is the full-length fic adapted from an ask that was sent to me in 2017 and for which I had wrote a short summary. You can go check at @esthergoldsteins. Further information:  
> 1\. I don't know where this is going  
> 2\. There is no age-gap, this is my realm  
> 3\. I miss eating out

Okay. Maybe Pansy Parkinson was not well aware enough of the breaking-up rulebook’s existence before actually doing it.

But could she have planned the world was fucking going to end, and burn and dies in the following twenty-four hours? No, she could not have. She could not have because she was busy emptying the cherry Coke cans her ex-boyfriend had left in her mini-fridge, a sad remnant of a time where she cared more about biting the sugar off his chapped lips than about the tons of chemical agents in there supposed to mimic the taste of cherry.

And before that, she was busy throwing at him everything she could get a hold of, including his favorite mugs, his pillow which was stained with drool and black har, and a lot of curses.

She hated cherry cola for all that mattered. She hated how he could never manage to respect the tacit agreement established concerning his side of the bed. But Pansy Parkinson was a methodical and practical girl. She cleaned _his_ cupboard and _his_ bathroom shelf, she deleted his number and put a sticker on his face so she could keep the photo of them in front of the British Channel – their trip to the coast was amazing, green water sea and his hands everywhere on her like tentacles – because she loved the aesthetic of it, or at least the scenery’s, but she cannot bear the sight of his skinny bones.

She could not even look at it for too long, his straight face and his dark dilated pupils gazing the tempestuous sea, waves licking at his toes and the gray horizon breaking up the pink shade of his skin underexposed to sun and salt and wind and to the world.

She had drawn a sharp breath and wiped out every evidence of her ever falling in love with an anemic-looking guy.

It is why, when someone knocked at her door at 11 am, the day after her maniac cleaning session, when her apartment still reeks of detergent and overpriced interior _fruity_ perfume, she opened it with so much confidence. Regulus Black was a lot of things, a prince from another era who thought it was still trendy to wear high-knees socks, a coward, a guy to whom she had promised zero commitment and no strings attached, a bad brother and also a bad son from what she knew and she would not have known so much if she had not read his diaries because he had a lot of diaries and she is not even surprised because – but he was not the kind of man who came back.

Except, she opened the door and had to reconsider every assumption she ever had about him, because he was there, waiting on her doorstep. She was hit by the smell of grease and cheap acne-inducing fast food, before being hit by how much she needed to see an ophthalmologist.

She readjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose, just to set her mind at peace. She was seeing double. There was Regulus, pale face – his skin paler than usual which was an accomplishment in itself – dark circles under his eyes, so purple and blue and so deep they looked more like bruises but once again Pansy would not pity the fact that he was sleeping poorly because he had lost the only great thing that ever dared laid an eye on him, and the palms of his hand covered with what looked like dirt, or ashes. She fumbled at the sight of his bitten nails.

But then beside him, was standing a taller man. He looked older. There was something mischievous about the way he was leaned against the doorframe, holding three brown paper bags in his hand. It seemed that everything Regulus lacked poured out from his nonchalant attitude. He was bigger, stronger, fiercer.

It was like seeing a straight-narrowed road, the kind on which people recklessly hit the gas and speed away because it was _fine_ and just ended up dead, whereas Regulus was this crooked road with its turnarounds and cliffs.

Grease leaked from the bottom of the bags that bore the hideous logo of the drive-in from the end of the street. The taller man’s smirk was violent and Pansy did not need to look twice to understand who was in charge around here.

She did not step back.

“I’m Sirius” the older said with a charming voice “I’ve brought lunch”.

If it was not her ex’s brother, maybe she would have snorted.

“I’m tired” she answered flatly because it is the truth. “If you pass this door, I will punch you.”

She warned him because if he is anything like Regulus, boys of their kind never believed what was before their eyes.

“I have told you, Sirius! She would never agree to do it!” finally exclaimed Regulus

“Keep calm, little bro’, you may know her but I have my way with ladies.”

* * *

Pansy had never been patient – Regulus knew that the cashier knew that, her mom knew that, for god’s sake, even the car washer knew that – so she punched him. A thing that, on the other hand, few people knew about her was that her daddy paid her self-defense lessons.

With boys, she never missed a hit.

She broke his nose, according to the sound that his bone made when it met her knuckles. Afterward, she realized how a bad idea it was. She had to make them enter in her living room because she could not let him bleed out in the corridor or else the neighbors would gossip, she had to make sure not a single drop of his cursed Black blood would ever stain her leather couch and dab his angular nose which had surely been broken before judging by its weird angle and the light in his eyes that must provoke a fight-or-flight reaction in most people, with a cotton and alcohol.

He had the decency to not whine like a _fucking_ baby, and it was at this exact moment – trying to distract herself from the burning gaze of Regulus on her place, on her back, on her face, while pressing a fucking cotton to the bloody nose of his bloody brother – that she noticed the strong odor of smoke on his hair and his clothes and the burns.

“What the hell is going on with you?” she shouted at Sirius, who apparently was the kind of man who was stimulated by arguing and conflict because his spine automatically straightened. “Aren’t you his big brother, the one who is so brave and full of himself that he ended up in juvie for 2 fucking years?”

She gestured at Regulus who stared down at his worn-out shoes.

“Have you taken him out on one of your noble causes to heal his broken heart? Are you searched by the police? Have you burnt a house for god’s sake because it looks like you did if I’m being honest!”

Pansy Parkinson was often qualified as an unstoppable force to be reckoned with, a loud, harsh, person but more often than not it was an understatement. She was highly irritated by privacy intrusion, in its various forms.

She despised how people comfortably hovered at her place during parties. There was anything she disliked as much as people scrutinizing at her walls, wondering why there were not any pictures hang upon them, or why everything felt so _cold_ and _white_ and _clean_.

Pansy Parkinson was not loud in the way most noisy things were. She was loud in the way bombs were, slowly counting down to the point of explosion in a way that prevented you to hear anything else but the sound of her patience wearing thin.

The problem was that Sirius Black, the notorious big brother of her ex-boyfriend, also formerly known for having been kicked out of most of London’s prep school and for a runaway teenagerhood that was described as a fever dream by Regulus, did not know her. _Yet_.

He was nothing like Regulus so he could not start a fire in her mind like his brother used to do.

“Okay, Pansy let me explain this” Sirius began slowly as if he was some sort of hippie middle-grade teacher and not a terrible big brother and a terrible prankster. She hated how he made her felt like a disposable toddler in her own _damn_ house for god’s sake. She tore her gaze away from Sirius’s supposed empathetic smile to look at Regulus.

The thought of them tangled in her silk bedsheets came poking at her brains as a bored child could do with a dead insect and too many curious fingers. It felt like so far away, so long ago. He must have caught her staring because he started rolling up his black sleeves.

She wondered if Sirius made him feel small too. If there was a plane of existence where he was the first to be born, the first to be trusted, and not only the second to disappoint. And when she took back her hand from Sirius’s injured face in order to throw the cotton in the bin, she could see the whole picture.

The thin thread that tied Regulus and Sirius together, thicker than blood, thick than decades-old-arguments, invisible but so permeable. Pansy scratched the back of her neck in frustration. It was sleek with sweat.

These boys were problems. Pansy had always had a straightforward solution to a problem. She ran away from them, the same way she had run away from her family after the court ruling, the same way she had run away from Regulus when it had become clear she was becoming too dependable on him, and that dependable felt in her own mouth like a day-old-chewing-gum that lost all its flavor.

Sirius gave her a crooked smile. Blood had crusted on his upper lips, and it gave him a devilish look. She thought about the marine poster that was displayed at the dentist cabinet she used to work at. About the sharks with their shiny teeth that were at the top of the food chain, and how the tiniest fishes bundled together in front of the threat.

She had the odd impression that there was something that was way more dangerous than Regulus’s rebellious and undisciplined clone out there. Something dangerous enough to make two estranged brothers knock on her door.

She tilted her head. “Why are you even here?”

He shrugged, it was a bit charming, a bit gauche, and wholeheartedly fake. He opened the nearest brown paper bag with a single hand and took out a wrapped-up burger. “Everything is burning outside and Regulus has thought that we could watch the end of the world with you. It seems that you have a fantastic view!”

* * *

The first thing that she took out from this delirious explanation that actually made no sense at all, was that Regulus never spoke with a full mouth. Then, she stopped on the patronizing accent of his answer.

She could have taken the bait and argued and played to determine who had more authority but she caught the gleam in Regulus’s eyes and the way his jaw was set even though he had just stuffed a handful of crispy too-yellow-to-be-potatoes-fries in his mouth. The corner of his mouth was slowly falling down. She stood up, hands on her hips and tried to channel the part of her that always made shoe seller and clothes-stores-owner really mad when they could not manage to find her size or the color she desperately needed. She usually stood there, glancing at them till something broke and the shoe box almost magically landed in her hands.

All that these people needed was a bit of conviction and a distilled fear.

“Stop, fucking kidding with me, Black.”

He was sipping at his soda, tinting the white straw with a light red ring. He did not seem to mind. But, when he realized she was on the edge of throwing him out by his ungodly curly hair, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and repeated “It’s the end of the world, Regulus wanted to check on you. I wanted to get the hell out of here. We’re here and the present situation is enjoyable for exactly…” He managed a dramatical pause, his lips curled upward as if he was thrilled to let his scenic performance sink in. He glanced around the room. “…No one.”

And god, she hated how they ruined her day. She could not help it but gave Regulus a stern look because if she was being honest, it was all his responsibility and if he had not seduced her with velvet black jackets and expensive dinners and a low voice that was rougher in broad daylight than it was at night, she would probably be on vacation with Daphne and Tracey and he would be bothering someone else.

And she grunted because Regulus had always had this bad habit of crawling under her skin, and invading her _personal space_ – surely to make up for the fact his parents did not want him at home, that his brother had chosen another brother of his own in the person of James Potter, an illiterate designer with an engrossing fortune who appeared, and Pansy had bumped into him once, to be oblivious to hair care – and it was driving her crazy.

So crazy she considered calling the police.

“If the world is going nuts as you say, I’m sure you won’t object the fact I’m going to call the cops on both of you for trespassing.” She thought she was a really good threatening presence.

But Regulus laughed. It was a dry laugh. His bad one.

“No, Pansy. Sirius doesn’t do metaphor, he –”

“But I could” intervened Sirius, with frowned brows as if it was really insulting to doubt his grammatical skills.

Regulus sighed, and Pansy tried to imagine them as kids, running through the manor they used as a playground. She could not.

“He literally means the world is ending.”

This time, it was Pansy’s time to smirk. It was Regulus’s things to enunciate words that made him feel like an intellectual such as _literally_ or _figuratively_ or _Pansy, you cannot understand the complexity of this economical recession_ , as if she was a bloody idiot who had created just enough money from thin air to waste it on designer shoes.

She knew where the money she _spent_ on designer shoes came from, even if he tended to forget it.

He rolled his eyes. She always had been subjugated by the length of his eyelashes.

“Just see by yourself, go to the window.”

She reluctantly walked to her panel window and pulled out the curtains.

Outside, everything was burning. It was pure and utter chaos. She felt like she was lacking of air, as if her whole body was made out of the same cotton, she pressed her against Black’s nose. She could not make out the purpose of her own body in front of what Regulus would call a _demiurgic work_.

Her throat tightened. The bile rising up.

Outside, it was almost like a firework. Orange, red, yellow. Car burning and melting on the sideways, broken windows shops, and flames swallowing buildings and people altogether.

Outside it’s –

“Pansy, your fries are going cold.” Sirius’s voice was careful, almost muffled but she attributed it more to her being _so far away_ , so small, so close to nothing than to him being kind or even civilized.

She could not take her eyes off from the end of the world. Not even for French fries. Something twisted in her guts, something sharp.

“We need to leave. Now!” she said coldly.

Outside it’s –

“Okay.” Neither of them moved. Regulus had his hand folded on his laps as if nothing was happening, as if their clothes bore no holes from residual fire, as if they did not smell of death or destruction or annihilation. Maybe he expected just that, maybe he knew what would happen when she would realize the whole world was not this safe _sterilized_ bubble she created for herself, and maybe this is why there was no bill in the fast-food bag and why neither of them tried to stop her.

Pansy Parkinson had always had a hard time processing radical changes such as a break-up. Or the end of the world.

She was outside before even thinking about it. And everything was burning.

* * *


End file.
